This week we finally see the results of all the work we put into Solution Manager 7.1 from system preparation through to technical monitoring. Although no two SAP environments are exactly the same, even though they may be based on the same products and installed in identical manners, hopefully, you have a good sense of what it takes to get technical monitoring up and running in Solman. Unfortunately, no amount of SAP documentation or guided procedures can give you the same sense as actually doing it or following along with an actual implementation, so we encourage you to try it yourself or use our example here to gauge and plan for such efforts since it's not trivial.
To recap the other 2 parts leading up to this final setup and demo, we completed:
- Netweaver on HANA Monitoring Setup Part 1 of 3 (Preparation)
- Netweaver on HANA Monitoring Setup Part 2 of 3 (Managed System Configuration)
The technical monitoring itself is the simplest part after all the groundwork has been done. It simply consists of choosing the monitoring scope based on the systems and templates that you already set up. We are using default thresholds out-of-the-box, so typically in your environment, you would need to plan another phase to configure thresholds, notifications, and any downstream integration such as service desk functionality. We recommend those to be done over a period of time with actual learning from the behavior of actual systems in use, typically with some representative test or production workload. Managing alerts, thresholds, and notifications is normally an iterative process, however, there must be at least a general service level defined for IT operations to implement the policies and procedures which address the overall performance and availability objective of the environment.
IMPORTANT: Note that Solman does not show the details of the alerts in the inbox, and still requires one to navigate to the managed system to troubleshoot the alerts (without time-sensitive context because one still has to find the alert/event if it still exists in the managed system when one performs the analysis). Alerts in Solman are a form of aggregation on events or metrics. It is still very hard to find the root cause or context of the problem or do any kind of correlation!
Here are the final configuration steps and some sample output of alerts and metric monitoring. There is a recorded video demo embedded but we'll also list it below here for convenience.
Imagine a typical SAP customer with 3 SAP Netweaver landscapes (e.g. ECC, BW, SRM, Enterprise Portal, etc.), how much time and effort do you think it takes to set up Technical Monitoring and make it useful for IT Operations and/or Basis team to make good use of it? What about hardware resources to run Solman efficiently? We're interested to know what your environment and efforts are like, to compare with our Solman implementation and consulting experience, as well as our cloud-based monitoring approach. It takes less than an hour to completely configure and monitor HANA from IT-Conductor. Give it a try!
